A Research On Model And Operating Mechanism Of Community Participation In Rural Eco-tourism

Eco-tourism plays a very important role in future sustainable tourism development. The goal of eco-tourism is to coordinate ecological, economical and social factors of target tourism areas. To achieve this goal effectively, local community involvement of tourism activity is required.The study of rural eco-tourism with community involvement brings great benefit for sustainable development of rural eco-tourism, population quality enhancement of rural community, solving job problems of surplus rural labor force, solving "three dimensional issues" of rural community. Generally, rural eco-tourism in China is still in the initial stage of development. There is a lack of mature management system, related laws and regulations, and consequently, there comes many problems. In this sense, the study of rural eco-tourism with community involvement is imperative.This paper stands on a number of research papers and practice research, and conducts a systematic research on the methods of how to involve rural community in eco-tourism.Based on newly developed theories of tourism sustainable development, eco-ethics, eco-tourism planning and game theory, this paper selects community involvement of Baisha village in Taihuyuan eco-tourism resort as practice research. Among several high community involvement and successful representative cases, Baisha community experienced a series of getting rich process: from selling land employment right to selling special local products and to selling local ecology advantage. In another word, they experienced a transformation from agriculture economy to forestry economy to tourism service economy. The average income increased from 814 Yuan of 1987 to roughly 3000 Yuan of 1998 and to about 20,000 Yuan of 2008. Development model changed from elite rural eco-tourism to local entrepreneur aided eco-tourism and to large-scale development. People's attitude in rural community has already changed gradually from rejection to support. So, the villagers actively involved in the eco-tourism development. According to statistics and analysis, four aspects of community involvement in rural eco-tourism are proposed to frame the involvement scheme, including guidance system, consulting system, guarantee system and assessment system resulting a relatively complete community involvement scheme.Among various ways in achieving sustainable development of society-economy-nature complex system in eco-tourism areas, eco-tourism is one of the best methods. This paper systematically states the models and operation mechanism of eco-tourism development. These achievements of this paper can be used for reference to eco-tourism development and eco-tourism community construction nationalwidely.